p When the great ideas of scientific communism first appeared, heralding the inevitable advent of a new stage in the development of society, they were met with a fierce wail of the reactionary bourgeoisie, which above all strove to persuade the sections of society under the influence of its views that the destruction of the capitalist system would amount to a destruction of mankind’s culture and civilisation, and of the pillars of moral and economic, social and intellectual life in society. It presented the fundamentally new stage in social development as a potential disaster for all mankind. Comte’s positivist sociological conception, which condemned “critical” destructive epochs and extolled “organic”, positive and constructive epochs backed up this approach, while a theoretical basis was provided by the bourgeois theory of progress, which declared capitalism to be the last and culminating stage of mankind’s development.

p In their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels responded to these slanderous charges with impeccable logic and showed them to be quite empty. They made it quite clear that there was no substance in the bourgeois claim that the capitalist system was the be all and end all of social life.

p However, for decades to come this myth of anti-communism would continue to be wielded as a weapon by the reactionaries. During the Paris Commune and the Great October Socialist Revolution the myth that communism posed a threat to the very foundations of the human community, which should allegedly be based on private property and the power of the bourgeoisie, was being spread about with especial insistence by all the bourgeois propaganda media. For their part, the social reformists joined in the general chorus of the reactionaries.

The bourgeoisie stubbornly refused to see the great creative power of the socialist revolution and the creative energy of the proletariat, which advanced at the head of the working people. It took long years for the ideologists of the bourgeoisie to start considering the great creative force generated by the socialist revolution in the masses. But one cannot say that the theorists of imperialism have altogether abandoned the old story about the “fall of civilisation”, and one will find it in the books and articles written by sociologists and philosophers following in the wake of Spengler, who prophesied in the 1920s “Europe’s decline”. The loudest voices in this chorus were those of the Nazis, who claimed to be the “champions of Western civilisation”, even if they were unable to play the part for long. The propaganda “legacy” of the Nazis is, of course, being variously used by the anti-Communists to this day, but more frequently the old myth is being spread by bourgeois propaganda in a somewhat different version.